Dark Sun
by Mewryuu
Summary: Everyone knows that umbreon are creatures of darkness, yes? Not anymore. Follow a young umbreon as he searches for the answer to his own unnatural evolution, and prepare to have eeveelutions redefined.
1. Part One

Dark Sun

"Why have you come?"   
"You know why I'm here." 

The first and elder of the two calmly looked over his visitor through half-lidded crimson blood eyes, his expression stern but curious. All in a moment's glance he took in the defensive stance, the firmly set jaw, the dangerous edge to his tone, and the hint of fiery rage locked within the younger umbreons burgundy gaze, barely contained and poorly hidden. Even more, he noticed the way the creatures coat was of the darkest of blacks like his very own, a blackness that did not seem to reflect the light so much as absorb it; trapped for lost eternity within the heart of a living shadow, broken only by rings of burnished gold. The difference was subtle, but the keeper of the skies knew them well within himself and saw them at once. He stared a moment longer in silence, unperturbed, and then turned abruptly and padded with a powerful sleek grace through the entrance, not looking back at the defiant creature as he spoke. 

"Follow me." 

The keeper of the skies set a quick pace down burnt and scorched corridors as the pair headed deep into the ruins, the younger struggling to keep up as he clambered over immense pieces of fallen ceiling while the elder lightly bounded catlike over the scattered rubble. They passed swiftly through abandoned labs that were littered and strewn with broken equipment and rusted machinery, pitted and shattered not through the work of endless time, no, though the forest had been quick to reclaim the land it had lost. Already leafy vines of a pale, fresh green and tangy scent twisted and twined and wound their way through the plaster and rocks, and saplings broke strong and true through the concrete foundation. A decade of abandonment, yet it held the mystic, untamed air of ancient ruins, of a wild power lost by countless centuries and haunted by the ghosts of knowledge. 

A decade since explosions wracked the Cinnabar Observatory as the labratory built beside it was torn apart in unnatural fury, since the walls heaved and the last worker fled, never to walk those broken halls again. 

The two then entered another room, claws clicking loudly on marble floors, and the newcomer's eyes softened in awe and wonder as he looked up at the great chamber's vaulting ceiling of reddish stone that arced high overhead, golden sunlight streaming through the system of cracks that ran through the rock and plaster like it was a skim of ice on a lake. The forest had moved in even swifter in this room, the crumbling walls merged with towering oaks and blanketed with ivy in the birth of an indoor jungle. Yet the young umbreon began to notice something odd as he trotted through the room, carefully sidestepping the warm rays of sun that lit up the drifting dust motes...something out of place among the cracked walls and green fern shoots. 

Lights. 

Not the brilliant wash of sunlight illuminating the room, but small, artifical lights-- florescent-- and the sheen of metal and the occasional red point glowing like a burning ember. Where in the other rooms all had been broken, this one held equipment that was strangely intact--makeshift handiwork, yes, but the clicks and whirs emanating from the depths told a different tale than the shattered screens and monitors that littered the outer ruins. The chamber hummed with working machinery, still on after all those years. 

Someone had been rebuilding. 

The elder reached the far side of the room and flicked an ear impatiently, then ran up a set of wiry, metal stairs that spiraled upwards tightly in a skeletal column of rust that breached the ceiling itself, and the young umbreon followed hurriedly, stumbling on the rattling steps. The newcomer slowed as they reached the top of the stairs, a small circular room above the roof--a dome, curved in a gray half-sphere. Light spilled from a broad rectangular opening in the dome onto a curious object in the center, a great vice painted white clutching an immense cylinder, and the dark sky-keeper climbed onto a cushioned office chair in front of it and finally turned his gaze back to his visitor, curling his tail about himself like a cat and sitting regally as one regarded the other, basking in the sun. The two stared at each other for a long moment in silence, the elder waiting patiently and calmly while the younger grew tense and anxious, waiting and wanting. 

"Why?!" The young umbreon finally demanded challengingly, shattering the silence, his voice echoing about the dome seething with anger and hopeless fury--yet there was a hidden note of something else to it, a source buried within himself. "Why am I like this?! Why did this happen? This is not what I chose," he growled in a dangerous tone, pacing back and forth a few times before glaring back up at the umbreon perched upon the chair. "Why?" 

"And why do you come to me for that answer?" The elder said, his crimson eyes again half-lidded calmly, his voice smooth and deceptively relaxed, though beneath that sleepy gaze his eyes were strangely intent. "I'm a researcher, not a fortune teller." 

"Because they say you were changed the same way," he replied, voice cracking, staring at the ground in disgust. "Because they say you're a freak too." 

The elder twitched unnoticably and frowned a moment, then sighed and closed his eyes in contemplation, still bathed in golden light. Finally, he spoke again, his tone changed. "When did it happen?" 

"So it's true..." the younger said quietly, raising his eyes to look at the elder on the chair as the anger broke away, spent itself and flowed out into the ground like water, leaving him strangely tired. "You were born in the light." 

"When?" The keeper of the skies replied intently, his expression unmoving. The younger sighed and lowered his eyes again, folding his black paws beneath him like a cat as he lay on the dusty floor. 

"Winter Solstice," he began quietly in a trembling voice thick with restrained emotion, his gaze still locked to the ground. "It--it was my coming of age ceremony. The clans of my homeland, we always placed great importance on that, it was the mark of a new life--I spent years making my decision. I chose day." He paused a moment and shifted, burgundy eyes wistful. "I chose light, and life. The eevee clan rejoiced, and the espeon clan gathered with them on the solstice at the top of the hill beneath the midday sun to await their new brother. I climbed to the top and stood with them as they chanted, waiting in the sunlight...and I..I..well, just look at me!" he spat bitterly, clenching his teeth. "Darkness born of day, night born of sun. An Umbreon born at high noon. The crowd was stunned, and the espeon pack told me they couldn't teach me how to be what I was...they sent me to the umbreon clan at the edge of the forest in the caves, Luna-raiht. But they said they couldn't take me in either...didn't know how, didn't know what I was. But they were kinder..they gave me my name, at least. Sol. Umbreon of the sun. And they told me where I could find you." 

He looked up suddenly, his eyes shining with tears. "The espeon clan, they--they told me the sun didn't want me... They said it rejected me, and that's why they had to cast me out. Because I was a freak." Sol finally broke down then, shaking and trembling with a desperate hopelessness and self-loathing. "Why? Why didn't the sun want me? Why did it turn away when I asked for light?" 

The keeper of the skies stood up then calmly on the chair, his eyes gentle and sympathetic but shining with excitement. "Did it ever occur to you..." He began, a strange glimmer flashing in his eyes again as he held his dark head high and quirked his muzzle knowingly in a faint smile, "That, perhaps...the sun _chose_ you..?"


	2. Part Two

Sol stiffened and froze in mid-tremble, abruptly snapped out of his grief and blind self-hatred, stunned into silence. He opened his mouth to speak and stopped again, raising an eyebrow. Slowly he lifted his head to stare numbly at the elder umbreon as though he had lost all traces of sanity. Perhaps he had. The young umbreons mind balked and stumbled as though he had just struck a wall or been kicked in the face, bewilderedly choking out the words. "What.." he paused, struggling to gather himself together, still staring helplessly, "do you mean by that..?"

"That perhaps everything you've ever learned was wrong, dark child of light," the elder replied calmly, his crimson eyes strangely intense and dancing with excitement. The sleepy gaze and mask of calm indifference had vanished, replaced by barely contained energy, a wild sort of delight that radiated from his very being. In an instant he had leapt down from the chair and was circling Sol, examining him from every angle, sniffing his shadow furred foreflank and lightly touching a warm gold ring with a paw before rounding about again and again, never in the same spot for more than a heartbeat. Sol clumsily tried to spin around to face him, baffled by the sudden inspection—baffled by everything. _Chosen..?_ All he had felt the long weeks he searched for the sky keeper, the inward anger and pain of rejection and loss—a relentless furious despair that gnawed at him inside—had somehow just been questioned by the old creature's cryptic words.

His entire life had just been questioned.

"Wh—what on Earth are you talking about, Sky Keeper?" He demanded, taking a defensive stance again. The elder umbreon ignored Sol and continued darting all around him, sending up small flurries of dust that flashed in the patches of sun.

"Call me Helio," the elder said absently. "Keeper of the Sky is a title, not a name. The Umbreon clan from which I haled many years past called me Helio, Umbreon of the Sun, and that will do just fine. The clans all have similar tastes, it seems." With a wry laugh and a flick of his ringed ear he came to a stop at last before Sol, the corner of his muzzle twitching into a slight satisfied grin as his eyes shone brightly with triumph. "It fits," he murmured quietly, almost to himself. "It all fits. Yes, you might just be it, might be what was needed all along—the missing element. The other pole." He paused a moment thoughtfully, considering, and as an afterthought added, " And I'm not talking about anything on Earth at all."

Sol simply stared, lost, and was met with a wink and a grin from Helio as the old umbreon waited for his young visitor to respond, his crimson eyes amused yet still serious; a strange combination. Sol shook his head, confused, and chose his next word carefully, unable to resist the thread of curiosity tugging at him…the thread that drew him back to the question he had begun with. The question he had come all this way seeking an answer for. "Why..?" He said quietly. "Why am I like this, why did this happen? What—" he then hesitated a moment, choking back a sob as emotion flowed over him again. "What am I?"

Helio smiled kindly, the tip of his tail swishing slowly from side to side in steady rhythm as he closed his eyes contemplating, yet still holding himself with the manner of one who was on the verge of a great secret. "Follow me," he opened his crimson eyes with that sleepy intense gaze and suddenly bounded to the edge of the latticework wire staircase. This time, he looked back over his shoulder at his visitor and regarded him again. "There are things you must learn and things you must unlearn to understand what and why we are."

Before Sol could answer, the powerful old umbreon had disappeared down the steps. He hesitated, then quickly trotted after him. They emerged together back in the vaulting chamber, and Helio padded towards a paneled wall on the far side. Hopping lightly atop the monitor, the Keeper of the Skies extended his claws and carefully clicked them on the dusty keys. Glancing up at the dead screen and frowning, he struck the side panel with his paw and the casing fell open, revealing a coppery circuitboard. "Ah, the connector came loose.." he muttered, scrutinizing it with a slitted eye and then reared and gently took a few slender wires in his jaws."

Sol blinked, then drew in his breath in surprise and stepped back a pace. "You!" Something clicked in his mind. He looked quickly about the immense room at the glowing lights, the whirs and hums, the recently polished metal—all in a lab destroyed and abandoned a decade or more. Remembering the sudden strange shift from broken equipment to duct taped but working machinery, his thoughts from only a few minutes before came back to him. 

__

Someone had been rebuilding.

"Mmm?" Helio said around a mouthful of wires. Brushing aside a creeping vine that had snaked its way into the circuitry, he jammed the wires one by one back into the panel, then shut the case with a satisfied huff.

"You—you're the one who did all this. Who fixed everything... you rebuilt the entire place yourself, didn't you? But how? Why?"

"Of course I did. They call me the Keeper of the Skies for a reason, young one," He chuckled as he padded back across the desk and unsheathed his black claws again. This time, when they lightly tapped the keyboard, the screen before him flared into life with a resounding thrum, emitting an eerie green glow as letters wrote themselves upon the glass—meaningless to Sol; he could not read. No eeveelution could, nor could they write. 

Or so he had thought before today. 

"I'm an astronomer, of sorts. I came upon this place many a winter moon ago, and over the years I taught myself to use it, and to improve it. Mostly from scratch. You could say I'm a bit of a technological genius--or a mechanic, whichever you prefer." His tone was not one of someone boasting and bragging, or of false modesty. He stated it as a simple fact. "As for why…to learn. I came here seeking the same answers you have, and I found them." There was a pause before he continued, abruptly changing subject. "Tell me, Sol, what is the difference between night and day?"

"Night is guarded by the eternal Moon and held in darkness, from which the Lunar element is born. Day, its opposite, is guarded by the everlasting Sun, which is the soul of light and source of the Solar children who speak with their minds," he responded automatically, repeating what was taught to every young eevee, word for word. "Day is the essence of light and life, while night is the essence of darkness and death, the two great opposing forces."

"Wrong!" Helio crowed triumphantly, ignoring Sols startled expression. "Tell me, when does day end and night begin?"

Sol looked at him queerly before answering, puzzled. "The moment the sun crosses the horizon, of course."

"But is it not still light out?" Helio countered quickly.

"What?" Sol blinked quizzically.

"When the sun has just disappeared out of sight, does some of its light not remain awhile afterwards?"

"Well, yes," Sol said, flustered. They were simple enough questions, but he hadn't stopped to think about them before—no one questioned the teachings. "Then night begins when all of the suns light is gone, and the moon and stars are fully out in the dark sky."

"And when is that?" 

"..Eh? What do you mean?"

"At what precise moment does one declare that all of the light has left the sky, and that day has ended and night has begun? Do you sit on a hill and point at the sky and announce 'Aha! _That_ was the last bit of sunlight! That photon, right there!' The transition from 'day' into 'night' is a gradual process of fading, one bleeding into the other. So when does one end?" Helio folded his paws and smirked at the visitors stunned silence.

"It—but—it has to, it--" He stuttered, grasping at concepts and sayings of the teachings and finding none that would fit. "I…you can't. You can't find a moment when day changes to night. It..doesn't exist." The creature was stunned by his own response.

Helio nodded his sleek black head, satisfied. "And by that reasoning, day and night never end. More than that, they are one and the same." He waited for this to soak in before continuing, indifferent to the fact that in some eevee cultures—the ones where espeon and umbreon rivaled each other bitterly--what he had just stated was blasphemous. Heresy, treason. "Strange words from an Umbreon, aren't they?"

Sols flicked his tail as he spoke slowly, completely unfazed, except by the strange ideas dawning in his mind. "But you're not a normal Umbreon, and…neither am I. And …and if night and day are the same..they aren't opposites."

"Very good," Helio said proudly, secretly pleased. Though he struggled, the young umbreon was catching on faster and was far more open minded than he had hoped. "The entire concepts of 'night' and 'day' are _meaningless_. They are arbitrary. No more than two names for the same thing, and everything you were ever taught about them was wrong. I'm making it my business to unteach them. Now, eeveekind is unique among all living creatures in that we can be reborn in three ways: the stones of the earth, the light of the sun, or the light of the moon. Three celestial bodies, three basic kinds of eevee—the eevee of earth being subdivided again into three separate elemental breeds, which I won't go into much right now as it won't help to explain what _we_ are. So, we have three Earth eevee, one Lunar eevee, and one Solar eevee. Isn't it strange though, that the lunar and the solar are both only one each and supposedly opposites, yet born of night and day—which we have already proven to be the same?"

The young umbreons eyes widened as the idea suddenly began to make sense to him, his ringed ears pricking up in curiosity. "It _is_ strange.." he mused, awed by the concept. "And—when you think about it—the two are each created from light, just the light of the sun and the light of the moon."

"Yes!" Helio cried, his face shining with excitement again, tail lashing fervently about. "Yes, exactly. Furthermore, the moon does not create its own light, it reflects it—from the Sun. The sun, a star. And the night sky is full of trillions upon trillions of stars shining down on us, just like our own sun—only from farther away. Don't you see? _Both umbreon and espeon evolve from the light of stars!_ The light is just dimmer at one point because less of it is reaching us at once, and because it is much, much older. But it is the same."

"..Then—then they're connected. Espeon and Umbreon, psychic and dark, they're not opposites, they're like parts of a whole, and—and—"

"And there are not three and one and one, but three Eevee of earth and stone and two Eevee of the stars and light. Right?"

"Right."

"Wrong." Helio's crimson eyes danced smugly beneath their strange half-lidded intense gaze as he extended a claw blunted from countless hours typing and tapped a few keys lightly, bringing a new image upon the computer screen, a telescopic shot of the blazing gold sun. The old umbreons voice rang in the sunlit air, echoing about the vaulted chamber. "There are both three Eevee of Earth and _three_ Eevee of Stars."


	3. Part Three

Authors Note: I suppose I should have done this on the first chapter, but I forgot. ^^;; Anyway, this fic was inspired by a college Astronomy class I took at Johns Hopkins last summer, so this is actually based on true facts, that's why I put it as sci-fi. I just twisted it to fit pokemon when I found an interesting name in my textbook and couldn't resist creating something off of it (as will be revealed in this chapter ^^;; ). Pokemon are copyright Nintendo and Gamefreak, but this idea and all the research behind it is copyright to me. ^^;; This isn't the last chapter, there's about two more to go, I'm almost done with the next one. Thanks everyone for reading! ^_^

_____

"Come," The elder beamed, grinning, and motioned with his paw to an empty spot on the desk beside him. "Come up here, and I will show you what you need to know."

The warm shafts of light piercing through the indoor canopy had faded and grown dim, and finally died away as the great chamber and its newborn forest were plunged into dusky twilight. Red and green pinpoints of light glowed and blinked in the shadowed room, and florescent strips flickered into life. The two umbreon had not yet noticed the change, however; their crimson and burgundy eyes drinking the darkness like it was day, and their minds held captured by greater things.

One in desperate need for an answer, the other waiting to give it and eager to begin the next step.

Sol stared a moment longer, once again stunned into wondering shock by Helios cryptic nature, and then coiled his legs determinedly and sprung like a lithe cat onto the desk before the eerily glowing monitor. Helio nodded in approval and clicked his black claws rapidly over the keys, expanding the image of the sun until it filled the entire screen, a brilliant fiery gold speckled with dark patches and molten flares.

"Have you ever seen a picture of the sun like this, Sol?" Helio inquired, his lashing tail-tip betraying his excitement.

"No.." He murmured, peering closer with a curious expression on his muzzle. With the white glare of the sun removed, he could for the first time see its mottled colors and liquid flames splashing from the surface into the invisible misty corona. A golden Lazarus of autumn fire. For a moment pain flashed across his face; this was the celestial body of flame that had cast him out of the light. _The sun didn't want me.._. "It's beautiful."

"Very beautiful," Helio agreed quietly. The Keeper of the skies touched his paws to the board again, and reclined slowly as the image enlarged again. "Do you know what all the dark markings on it are, though?"

"Yes..the espeon clan used to describe it to us in the evenings when they visited," Sol replied distractedly, refering to an espeons ability to look directly into the sun, mirroring the umbreons night vision. "They're called sunspots."

"Good," he said, pausing a moment before continuing. "A sunspot is a mysterious thing. Remember, a few moments ago, when I told you that both umbreon and espeon evolved from the light of stars, there was simply less of it, and dimmer, for one of them? Keep thinking about that. In a way, it is the key to understanding our nature." Sol raised an eyebrow at this, but the elder ignored it. "A sunspot, when looked at in a picture such as this, appears as a small dark patch on the surface of the sun. Deceiving little phenomenon. You see, my child, it only appears dark in contrast to the rest of the sun. But when it stands alone..it looks like _this_."

The keeper clicked a single key, and the screen suddenly began to run through a series of photographs, each an enlargement on the one before from a new and stronger lens. The frames were narrowing down until it was a quarter of the sun, then a fraction, then a smaller piece, and in each one a dark sunspot loomed closer and closer until it dominated nearly the entire screen…then the frames changed one more time, and it was gone.

"What—where'd it go?" Sol asked, blinking at the bright square of fire and gold.

"You're looking at it. That is a picture of _just_ the sunspot—and it looks just like the rest of the sun. A sunspot in itself is a very bright thing—most other objects at a temperature of about five thousand Kelvins are, after all. The background is brighter because it is hotter. That is the difference between a sunspot and the rest of the sun. Both are made of the same material, both are incredibly hot, but a sunspot is a _cooler_ region of the photosphere—a layer of the sun. It ranges from 4500 Kelvins to 5500 Kelvins, from the center to the edge of it, while the rest of the photosphere stays at about five thousand, eight hundred. Are you following this?"

"I think so," Sol said uncertainly. "So its like how night and day are the same, there's just less star-light at night, while there's less star-heat in a sunspot."

"Exactly," he said, once again mildly surprised at the young ones speed. "Now then, tell me..what is the color of our fur?"

Sol blinked. Then he threw a look at Helio as though he were insane, and blinked again. "Black, of course. Oh, and gold, if you count the rings. What sort of a question is that?"

"A very deceptive one," Helio replied with a cryptic smile. "Look at your paw next to the picture on the screen, and next to my paw—very dark, isn't it? All umbreon are jet, midnight black. Darkest of all darks. You noticed this of course when you met them, didn't you?"

"Well, obviously."

"And did you look at yourself then? With them in light, I mean."

"What?" Sol groaned weakly, a pained expression on his face. "Couldn't you just state something directly instead of being mysterious about it..please?"

"It is better for me to show and guide you, and let you figure it out partly for yourself, than for me to tell you," he shrugged. "As I was saying though, colors appear different in their contrast to each other. The sunspot proves this. Look at yourself compared to an espeon, or me compared to a ray of sun, and we are quite black. But, look at us now compared to a _true_ umbreon, without nights cloak to blend us together, and tell me what you see."

This time the glowing monitor abandoned the images of the sun completely, and instead a sleek, normal black umbreon took its place on the screen, caught in the instant of wincing as it strayed into a patch of sun. Lights came on around the desk, illuminating the two creatures and the close-up documentary picture Helio had borrowed.

"I'm afraid there are no real umbreon I could persuade to come here, so this will have to suffice," He shook his head. "Anyway, this is a picture of a true umbreon, one born at night, and in lighting just as bright as that which we are in now. Put your paw to the screen."

Resisting the urge to roll his eyes, still tugged at by the twinge of curiosity, he obediently lifted his paw and slowly pressed the soft pads against the cool glass. "And..this is supposed to do something?" The elder remained silent, and so Sol shook his head once in exasperation and turned his gaze back to the screen, calmly regarding his forefoot and the figure of glass. His eyes grew relaxed as he absently stared at the picture's midnight form, blacker than coal, black as ebony, as his soft gray paws rested against it. 

Then it registered.

Sol shrieked and recoiled from the screen, wide-eyed in renewed shock, then hesitatingly held his trembling paw up again. _Gray_. He pulled his paw back and put it forward several times, as if it were an illusion he could dispel, but it stuck firm and true. The silky fur of his paw was dark, nearly black—but only when held up to a darker, truer black did it suddenly appear as a dark, dusty gray, a few shades too light to be that essence of blackness that was an umbreons fur. For the moon-star eevee varied in countless ways between individuals, but the furred pelts of all were the same, for they had reached the point where it could grow no darker. As he contrasted his color to that on the screen, Sol could not deny that his was lighter, that his was dusk gray in comparison. If umbreons were as the night sky, then he was the color of the night clouds through which the starlight shone. A lighter kind of shadow.

"You met the Umbreon clan at night, didn't you?" Helio said softly from behind, his voice filled with gentle sympathy. "You couldn't see it for what it was until now. It was the same with me for a very long time."

"Is—is this because of how we were reborn? Is that why we look like this? But why? How? I still don't understand…don't understand what we are." The young visitor was quiet for several minutes as his mind tried to absorb all he was learning and piece it together, twist it into an answer, but the secret would still not yield itself to him. A thought occurred to him, and he finally raised his burgundy eyes again. "You..you spoke of sunspots. How it was really bright, it just seemed dark in when compared to the rest of the sun. Night and day are one as the dark and light are one. But it isn't the same with us, we may be darker than an espeon, but we're lighter than an umbreon, our own kind. The analogy doesn't fit."

"No, it doesn't." He smirked slightly in amusement at the young creature's expression, then took a new tangent. "Because you're still thinking in terms of opposites. Night and day are made of the same stuff just as a sunspot and the photosphere are made of the same stuff. But what of dusk, and dawn? We proved they were the same by the fact that they never end, they bleed together. Twilight is the same as both, it simply has less light than day, and more than night. What if the sun was like that?" Helio paused significantly. "What if Eevee are like that?"

"What are you getting at? Why on earth are we still talking about sunspots?" Sol asked, confused. Helio had a very roundabout way of explaining things.

"Think, young one. An espeon is born when there is much starlight, an umbreon is born when there is little. And then…there is us." Claw touched keyboard, and the screen reverted back to a middle shot of the sun and the dark blotch marring the surface. "We are the edge of the shadow. Look at the picture again, child. At a glance it's just a dark spot, but if you look closer you'll notice a sunspot actually has two parts to it. The core, which is dark, and then a slightly lighter ring around it in which the gases are hotter than in the center, but still not _quite_ as hot as the rest of the photosphere. So we have three grades of light; the brightest, the darkest, and a fuzzy area inbetween. Just like the cycle of the day. Bright, dark, and inbetween, it's all a matter of degree. The first is a mirror of the second. Isn't it funny how a star like this has three levels of light, the day has three basic levels of starlight, and eeveekind can be reborn by star in three ways?" Sol shot him a startled look as his eyes grew wide in realization and understanding, the concepts suddenly bonding together. Helio smiled and nodded. "Yes."

"Bright, dark, and inbetween—dusk. You mean…you mean we…"

"The reason I like to bring up the idea of sunspots so much," Helio suddenly interrupted, a knowing glimmer in his eyes, "is because I stumbled across a curious thing one day about them. The different parts of a sunspot, they have names." His voice lowered softly. "Do you know what the center of a sunspot is called in scientific circles? They named it the Umbra." Stunned silence echoed between the two, the young visitor held in quiet awe. "I find it fascinating, because the Umbra is made of starlight, just less than the rest of the star, and an Umbreon is born in starlight, just less than an Espeon is born in. Then we have the area between the two, the small gray ring made of more starlight then the Umbra, but less than the photosphere. A lighter kind of darkness, or perhaps a darker shade of light." His voice lowered again until it was no more than a whisper, his eyes shining excitedly in the dark. "They call it the Penumbra. And we, my child, are the Penumbreon. The third Eevee of Stars."

"Penumbreon," Sol whispered softly, trying the word out on his tongue and then smiling faintly at the way it somehow..felt right. A name, a kind. "Penumbreon."


	4. Part Four

Thanks everyone! ^_^;; Sorry it's taken so long for me to update (I wonder if anyone will even remember it ^^;; ), but I've spent the whole month doing midterms and filling out college applications and trying to start my financial aid papers..in other words, haven't had any time to write. ^^;; To those who asked, sure, you can put it up on your site. ^_^ I never mind letting people put up my works, as long as I'm given credit (stealing I do mind ^^;; ). Anyway..enough of my rambling, here's what'll likely be the second to last chapter. ^^;;  
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The young Penumbreon jumped back on light paws at the whirring grind filling the air and reverberating heavily around him; crouching down cautiously as the entire top of the dome above began to slowly rotate. He spun about, watching it warily, and spun again, feeling as though the room itself were spinning too as the curved ceiling turned and adjusted itself. The effect was unsettling, yet strangely hypnotizing.  
  
"Relax, it'll only be a moment," The keeper of the skies reassured him calmly without taking his gaze from the worn monitor before him; the sole source of faint light in the small room. "The dome turns to face any slice of the sky you want it to, you just give it the degree. Rather ingenious little invention, I must admit. Ah, there we go," Helio said with a satisfied look, and clicked his claws against the keyboard. The rumbling quieted and the dome came to a stop, it's echo carrying on a few moments before submitting to the silence. "Now watch."  
  
"Why are we up here?" Sol asked quietly, feeling somehow unwilling to break that silence of the dark, almost as though out of taboo, or of ancient respect. Night's blanketing void had cast away days mask in full and revealed the heavens and the stars as the two penumbreon had traveled once again up the wrought iron stairs to the strange room atop them, each lost in their own silent thoughts and filled with questions. The elder would wait to ask his however; the young one still had more to discover.  
  
"To learn." The keeper of the skies smiled briefly, and hit the enter key. The rumbling abruptly began again, but more focused, as a single vertical panel of dome slid down to show the glittering dark sky. The light of the milky moon spilled in through the opening that stretched from the top of the ceiling to halfway down the sphere in a tall rectangle, and a crisp night wind whisked through to rustle the curling vines and the gray creatures fur. The great white vice that had sat cold and lifeless in the center of the room then began to hum and turn, coming alive as it smoothly tilted the immense cylinder it clutched towards the open sky. "Have you ever seen a telescope before, Sol?"  
"No..I've only heard of them."  
"I could tell." He grinned. "It's a device that lets you see things far, far away-there are mirrors inside that focus the light it gathers and magnifies it into a single, sharp image. Some use lens, but the mirrors work better-this used to be a lens telescope actually, until I found that out and fixed it. It bends the light-when light hits or it comes from an image, it spreads out in all directions. The telescope gathers it and brings it back together to a point. You following this?"  
"Yes," Sol nodded quickly, struggling to find the words. "I think so, at least. Like..like another eye, almost. One that works in addition to your own."  
"Not a perfect analogy, but that's the gist of it." He nodded in return, the room freezing in its new position and falling into dormant silence once again. "I thought you might like to try one. It's a whole new perspective through that eyepiece, one that it takes a rare sort of creature to appreciate; and one should never come to an observatory without seeing the telescope. It's an experience you don't easily forget--seeing the universe. Take a look, child...I think you might enjoy it."  
  
The young penumbreon approached the structure of metal and glass slowly; a treasure box holding locked secrets and a door to another realm..he needed only to peek through the keyhole. His entire body flowed with a sort of feline alertness even as he pushed the wheeled office chair with his forepaws over to it and scrambled atop the cushioned seat, breathing softly as he lifted his head and looked through that secret doorway.   
  
He found the heavens.   
  
"That's..that's.." He looked enraptured at the pale form, touched by the simple breathtaking beauty of a shadow on white.  
  
"The moon, yes," Helio nodded. "More specifically, you're looking at the Mare Imbrium, one of the prettier ones if I do say so myself. Of course, it's not really a sea, but then any name is meaningless upon a natural majesty such as that, isn't it? Had a good look yet? Good, I thought I'd start you out on something closer to home. Try this now." Smooth and slow, the telescope searched out its new position towards the sky. Past the moon, past the planets, pointing someplace greater. Something different.  
  
This time Sol made no sound as he stared in awestruck silence through the eyepiece. He did not breathe, he did not blink. Instead, his body grew tense as eyes of crimson took in the dim swirl of mist in the dark void, crested by tiny cold diamonds of light that burned..burned. Burned with the white fire that he was reborn in, marked forever by the gray ashes of his rise in the winged rays of the sun.  
  
But the darkness burned too, burned with the unseen, burned with...he felt it, he felt it there, but he could not name it. It caught on the edges of his vision, and simply burned.  
  
"Beautiful, isn't it? A nebula. Womb of the stars. Terrifying, but beautiful." Helio smiled, that strange glimmer in his half-lidded gaze.  
Sol looked at him, startlement painted across his face and the stars still somehow reflected glossily on his eyes. Something felt important about the moment, about the darkness, a turning point, and he spoke quietly. "What is that?"  
"What is what?" Helio asked innocently. "A nebula? Why, a nebula is a cloud of interstellar gas in which the particles gravitationally attract until-"  
"No, no, not the nebula, the other..thing..the.." Sol suddenly fell silent, lifting an eyebrow slowly. This.. this isn't what I'm supposed to ask, he realized. I'm not thinking his way, not starting at the right point. He wants me to play the game, to ask it his way. To make the connection myself. Helio calmly groomed a paw, feigning disinterest, and Sol grinned slightly. It's my move, then.  
  
"Everything we've talked about so far has had to do with degrees of light," Sol said aloud, half to himself. "Night and day being one, the anatomy of a sunspot..." He mused a moment quietly. "And...everything has been building towards us. Every lesson, every point, it always ends back at us. The lighter shadows." So what he's showing me right now must be the next step..in learning what we are. Because a name is meaningless without something to put it on, like the moon...some parts of a creature are above names. He's trying to teach me what it is to be a penumbreon.   
  
Question is, where to begin.  
  
Silence returned to the domed room again as Sol sat down in a pool of moonlight and studied his own gray fur, turning his paws over as he wondered. Helio idly batted a pebble about in the corner, having seemingly forgotten that Sol was even there. He was briefly irritated at being ignored, until he caught the old penumbreon sneaking a glance his way and met his gaze for an instant. The skykeeper winked, and returned to his pebble. The night slowly passed on, the moon crossing its quarter in the sky as beneath it two shadows pondered and waited.  
  
Sol suddenly lifted his head sharply and grinned. "Winter Solstice." Mildly the elder lifted an eyebrow, masking an amused smile.  
"Now that's a very random thing to say, to the point. How did you come to it?"  
  
"Ah, ah, ah, oh no you don't, you know exactly how it goes. I'm going to ask what it is to be a penumbreon or some such, and you'll turn my question back on me and we'll banter back and forth until I start wondering why on earth I came, so on and so on. Then I remember my original question and stop, and ask what made us evolve into this, and you'll grin and say 'You already know.' I become greatly confused, and you cleverly make me remember what I told you when I first came: when it happened. So it's Winter Solstice. I evolved on the Winter Solstice, and if my guess is right then you did too."  
"And you plotted this entire conversation out in your head, eh? Just on a hunch?"  
"Well, er..yes."  
"Bravo!" Helio roared, laughing and grinning. "Well done. Yes, you're quite right; I was reborn on the Winter Solstice, many years ago. Now you're starting to think like a scientist." He sat back on his haunches, pleased. "Sometimes you have to answer your questions yourself, I won't always be here to tell you, and I certainly didn't have anyone to tell me. Now, do you know just what the Winter Solstice is?"  
"Yes, of course; the shortest day of the year-sunlight-wise. The days grow shorter and shorter throughout the winter until that turning point, and then they grow again. Because of the angle of the sun to the earth. It's considered a special celestial day..that's why I'd chosen it to evolve."  
"Very good." The skykeeper trotted over to the metal desk and sat down before it. "But can you tell me how this is significant..to us?"  
  
Sol paused. "Espeon evolves in the light of the sun during the day...Umbreon evolves in the light of the sun at night-off the moon. Winter Solstice..is the day of the least direct sunlight of the year. Even at noon, the light is thin, stretched. Even..at noon." He closed his eyes and laid back his ears. "So that's why."  
  
"We are creatures of dusk and dawn, and twilight," Helio said softly. "That has nothing to do with the setting or rising of the sun, no. We are the inbetween ones, the half-light. Graced with new forms with the sun at its farthest point, for you see, the light was stretched thin then in a way no turning of the earth could mimic. Do not mistake us for anything other than our own creature, though; we may resemble the umbreon in form, but we are just as different and as similar as an umbreon and an espeon."  
  
"Espeon and umbreon are opposites in type."  
"Are they now? Just like day and night are opposites, ne? Ever wonder just why dark is immune to psychic?"  
  
Sol hesitated, unsure. "Actually...actually, I have." A weight felt almost lifted from his shoulders as he said it, the weight of denial, and he continued trying to put his vague and scattered feelings to words faster. "A few months ago, I stumbled into a Xatu's nest full of chicks, and the mother went absolutely wild...it felt like my mind was on fire. I told myself it was just a headache from all the noise, but that's when I started wondering. It feels like I am, and I'm not. I've..I've never been able to really admit it to myself until now, or to explain it, I always just said it was the work of the sun's rejection that made it feel..strange. Like I'm a little bit immune to both, a little bit weak to each." He paused again. "The power, inside me, it...it tingles. Do you feel it?"  
  
"It sings," Helio said quietly, and the young penumbreon nodded in agreement. "The Dark type has long been associated with the night, with the moon, while Psychic is of the day and the sun. 'Day and night, night and day, let the starlight pave the way,'" he chanted in an almost sing-song voice. It was a rhyme that mothers of eeveekind sang to their kits on winter nights burrowed in the warm den, a sort of lullaby to coax them into dreaming. "Let the light pave the way."  
  
"And night and day are the same." The penumbreon pricked his ears, catching on. "So--so Dark and Psychic aren't two different elements, they're-"  
"Two ends of the same spectrum. The electromagnetic spectrum, to be exact. Our powers are of the light itself, gifts of the stars. All three types of star eevee."  
"Light..but why then is dark immune to psychic?"  
A sly grin crept on Helio's face. "Because the dark type is given to them by reflected starlight instead of direct. So, to put it bluntly: Dark reflects Psychic attacks like the moon is a mirror reflecting sunlight."  
  
Sol's muzzle quirked into a grin. "I should have thought of that. Shadow can't exist without light, so in a way, shadow is light, light is the source of shadow and cannot exist without shadow..and we're the lighter shadow. We're in between...what do you call our element?"  
"What do you want ours to be called? We are the only creatures of Twilight...there are none others like us that I know of, and none that have been named. We are what we wish to be."  
"Twilight type. Or, maybe..Eclipse type. Day and darkness at once, a little bit of each. Or...perhaps all three kinds are simply Light type."  
"Perhaps they are." Helio smiled. "It does not matter what we call it; whatever the name, it will be unchanged. It is part of what we are, and only a very small part. Some things are beyond the power of words to describe."   
  
The two penumbreon looked at each other in a sort of deeper understanding, elder and younger, the only two of their kind. The younger looked up again at the darkened sky and its pale dusting of stars across a blackness that to him felt not empty, but rather full...full, and burning. Burning and rippling like a wave of heat, but the sky stayed still as ever and the stars held motionless in appearance. But something was there. "It tingles...burns. Sort of like that does, when I look at it." The silence was somehow more peaceful now, less deafening, and Sol relaxed his gaze. The moon above had almost finished its midnight journey, hanging round and full near the edge of the sky; the line of the horizon hinted at the coming of the sun. "Why do we look so much like the Umbreon?"  
  
Casually the elder groomed a gray foreleg, pausing a moment and glancing over before responding.   
"To show us the way."   
  
Sol lifted an eyebrow and the skykeeper stood up and padded over to him, that strange knowing glimmer in his crimson eyes again, and sat down next to the young creature and turned his muzzle skyward. He was building towards something.  
  
"You see, my child," he continued, "The universe is a beautiful but complex place of many secrets. Think of a black hole, a singularity... matter has the power to puncture a hole in the very fabric of reality itself. It is not a thing, it is a point, formed from the heart of a neutron star collapsing under its own weight, the very atoms crushed until the very rules of physics are dispelled and transcended. If Jupiter were a bit larger it would be a star, it has the fuel, but even as it is now if it were crushed by something unimaginable beyond the power of the four forces themselves to hold it..it would be a black hole. This pebble could become a black hole." He scooped up a small gray pebble much like his fur in demonstration, the moonlight shining on it dully. "The universe has rules, child, and it likes to break them. And a singularity is just that: singular, only one of the countless amazing things in this place we call a universe, each a miracle in its own right, each more mysterious than the next. A black hole can be born of the merest pebble, and a star can be born from a cloud of dust. There is more out there than could ever be seen...literally." He paused a moment. "Most of it cannot be seen at all."  
  
"Eyes can only see so far, as can telescopes...it's all too far away to see. And there are so many stars hiding what may be behind them," Sol said, shaking his head.  
  
"That's not quite what I mean." The skykeeper grinned and looked at the young penumbreon, holding his head high and his tail lashing eagerly. "I'm speaking of things outside the spectrum entirely. You know, most creatures look at the markings of an umbreon and think of the night and the moon--the phases of the moon, that's what they see it much as. When I first saw my own golden rings, however, I thought of it rather as the mark of an eclipse; an image of a darkened sun, light shining around the shadow-maybe even of a sunspot, of the penumbra itself. Sun with a shadow laid upon it, at least for our kind, even if they looked the same as the rings of the umbreon. Perhaps there's some truth in that still...perhaps that is one of the meanings hidden in our own fur. But I think, after spending time here watching the stars, that I have realized there is another. A greater meaning to these six gold rings and this ash gray fur." Helio looked up at the sky again to see the first few pale rays of light begin to touch the nighttime sky, marking the coming of dawn soon, and he smiled. "The sun has given us a map." 


End file.
